President Donald Trump on Thursday leaned further into his conflict with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, saying the central bank leader would be “out of there” if he asked him to leave.
“Oh, he’ll leave. If I ask him to, he’ll be out of there. But I don’t think he’s doing the job. He’s too late, always too late, a little slow and I’m not happy with him,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I let him know it, and if I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me.”
Whether Trump could remove Powell is an ongoing question. In the coming months, the Supreme Court will decide if Trump was legally able to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protections Board, but ramifications could be wider. If SCOTUS decides those firings were lawful, some legal scholars say the executive branch would then assert control over the Federal Reserve.